A Book I Wish Were More Popular

(I started today's Long and Short Reviews post so late, the only thng to do was to schedule it to go live early this morning.)

Well, I might wish everyone would read Laura Lee Cascada's collection, The Dog Who Wooed at the World, because it has a lot of good animals' stories in it, including our own Mogwai's. 

I might wish everyone would read Wendell Berry's What Are People For?. I do wish that, actually. I wish everyone had the mental preparation to understand that book. It's a condensed read, a sort of summary of everything he'd said in dozens of earlier books; not the last book Berry's written, but the one he wrote in the awareness that it might be the last. 

When the wave of COVID-panic-generated books has broken, I'll publish my big fat COVID-panic-generated book. Then I'll wish everyone would read that. 

Meanwhile, I wish everyone would read the Bible.

My father so often said, "Or the sacred scriptures of whatever other religion they were brought up in. The one I've studied is the Bible but if people really studied any of the other holy books and practiced what they teach, this would be a better world."

Well, that too...but I'm thinking in more of a scholarly sense. I see an unhealthy amount of confusion about the single most essential document in our culture. It's not even confusion about what the writers may have meant by certain words, some of which confusion may never be cleared up in this world. It's a very low level of misunderstanding. Yesterday I was looking up fun facts about a butterfly, and I came to a batch of articles about the "spiritual meaning" of butterflies of different colors. 

"What is the spiritual meaning of a butterfly in the Bible?" 

"Rebirth, transformation..."

Because they undergo complete metamorphosis, butterflies are good symbols of rebirth and transformation to us. To the ancient Hebrews? Not so much. The Bible writers seldom mentioned butterflies, moths, or caterpillars and what they say does not prove that they had even noticed that caterpillars morph into butterflies. They knew caterpillars as pests that could damage crops; they knew butterflies as unclean animals they tried not to touch. The symbol of rebirth, renewal, and transformation in the Bible is the seed that becomes a plant or tree. 

That people have added the butterfly to the tree as a metaphor for transformation may be a good thing. That they've forgotten that the tree was the metaphor used in the Bible seems like an index of how little we know about our culture's roots and base.  

In the past comedians used to joke about things that aren't in the Bible. "What does the nineteenth chapter of Daniel say? A-ha!" There is no nineteenth chapter of Daniel. Today, I suspect, if someone said that to a college class, the students would try to look up what that imaginary chapter says. From this stage it's not very far to the level of confusion in the Republic of Gilead, in The Handmaid's Tale, where people who read English Literature at university might remember that some of their government's favorite "scriptures" came from Marx or Freud, but nobody was very positive about which ones. 

So I wish everyone would read the Bible, in order to know what is and is not in it.